A Reed in the Wind

Copyright © 2008 by Thomas Griffith.

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Contents

A Winter Moon Or

A Brief Autobiographical Sketch

The Absurd Or

The Jungle Gives a Colder Stare

Dying Inside and Aging Out Or

How Life differs from the Rocks

A Psychedelic Nightmare Or

Like Christopher Columbus discovering the New World

Dreaming a Scene Or

The Logic of a Dream

Seeing a Dream Or

The Threshold of a Dream

A Meditation from Inner Space Or

Between Spectator Events and Volunteerism

Sex is so Philosophical Or

They’ll Bite the Hand that Bleeds

A Theory of Multiple Personality Or

If It Gives, then It Lives

An Anti-hero’s Notes Or

Word Wiring

To get Her Together Or

Why can’t We be Friends?

Friendly Faces in the Fire Light Or

To Our Children’s Children’s Children

The Family of Man Or

Functional Forms

A Winter Moon Or

A Brief Autobiographical Sketch

I was born in 1952 in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan,

Which is next door to Greenwich Village.

Hell’s Kitchen is named after

Its soup kitchens during the Great Depression.

I was born in an emergency operation

A month premature and blue.

My father said he wrote a letter then

For me to read when I was 21.

I never got it.

When I was two I fractured my skull.

I dove off my highchair onto my head,

Hoping to kill my brain, and end the pain in there.

Killing my mind still appeals to me at times.

But I found out early that being suicidal only makes things worse.

It is so easy for me to see that sabotaging yourself is

Just exactly the wrong direction to go in.

The purpose of psychology isn’t

To make us feel good,

But to help us cope with

Feeling bad.

Talk about trying instead of dying.

I almost died of pneumonia when I was three.

I still have clear memories of my pediatrician and his office

And even home visits.

He was good to me. Dr. Wilks.

I grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York.

I have been in 7 circles of male friends

And had around 10 girlfriends,

Since pre-school.

There have been best male friends,

And I hung out with a few married couples.

I only had sex with one of the girls, while I was 22.

Puberty drove me insane for a year.

I used to be a hippie, and believed in universal peace and love.

Now I am disillusioned, and believe in

An eternal cycle of

Struggling with conflicts,

And on the flip side,

The satisfaction which comes from resolving them.

Existence isn’t all that wonderful.

We can only take what we make.

I got B’s in school,

But nothing reached me and I was lonely and anxious.

It didn’t seem to me like the information was

Particularly targeted for my needs.

In fact I hated every second of school.

It was like institutionalization.

But I didn’t complain

And routinely changed to get along with others.

I would have liked to have found help,

But was afraid they would have

Changed me instead of helping me be myself.

As awful as ourself can be,

It still is who we are and we like it,

And definitely don’t want it destroyed or adulterated.

When I was twenty all the years

Of hardship and strain insidiously snowballed

To leaving me dead inside.

I had a traumatic psychiatric hospitalization.

After 5 months of aftercare,

I got a job with Head Start,

A pre-school program for ghetto children.

Later I worked in a hospital x-ray dept.

When I was 24 I realized the world is evil,

And had another traumatic psychiatric hospitalization.

You can’t get moss

From a rolling stone.

If we don’t have a conscience

Then we will be unfit for human company.

2 weeks after I got home from that hospitalization,

I realized my family was

Less on my side than the world.

I had another traumatic psychiatric hospitalization.

I am as close to my family

As shit is to a sewer pipe.

Most homeless were famililess first.

So are most suicides.

People imagine my hardship and obvious strain are

All an act to get attention,

And that their cause is all in my mind.

They think I’m faking it

Or trying to be something I’m not.

It’s only too damn real to me.

My favorite Buddhist expression is,

"The way which can be described,

Isn’t the Way."

6 weeks after the last hospitalization,

I got a job in a factory

And moved out of my family’s house

And moved in with 2 guys from work.

I had no choice.

The vision which confronted me was

That evil won and love died.

I tried like the devil

Not to let my insanity show.

I held that factory job for 8 months,

And was fired for absenteeism.

Then I worked as a garbage man.

It was summertime,

And the trash had enough maggots

To make me draw the schizophrenic conclusion

That flies were going to take over the planet.

After 3 weeks of that I went to the hospital.

I was ready, willing and able to be institutionalized.

That fate was grossly unfair,

After all I did and the effort I made

To successfully cope with the world despite by disability

And experiences of the jagged edge of reality.

At that time there were very few mental health programs,

But my father got me in one.

I orbited it for 12 years.

I ran a consumer speaker bureau

And was the guy at

A battered women’s shelter

For a year apiece.

I drove a van for 4 years.

I had four more psychiatric hospitalizations.

They were OK.

I became active in the state’s consumer (of mental health services) movement.

In the late ‘80’ around a half a dozen of us formed

A self-help and advocacy agency.

I have been president of the board 4 times.

We have grown to having around

A 12 million dollar budget

And around 120 full time employees

And more than that many part-time employees too.

I have had more than 25 jobs.

Most of them were part time

And all were minimum wage.

I have volunteered around 10 times.

All of my jobs were obviously of relatively short duration.

I usually stayed long enough to do the job well,

But people virtually practice ethnic cleansing on mental patients.

There is only so much you can take of that treatment,

Before it is easier to find another minimum wage job.

I have around 75 college credit hours

From 6 different colleges as I moved around.

I have never been married.

I am a vegetarian.

I’ve read a lot of classic literature

I play guitar pretty well,

And occasionally draw symbolic cartoons in pastels.

But it is the messages and waves of language

Which I think and feel about the most.

I have found that editing is

Just as important a skill as composing.

In ’90 I had my left leg amputated 4 inches below the knee

Due to gangrene due to poor circulation.

I get around pretty well on prosthesis.

In ’94 I had a heart attack,

And have been seeing a cardiologist since then.

Since then there have been no major pitfalls.

I did experience 20 or 30 seconds of terror once,

But it was just in and out.

I was fine again as soon as it was over.

I have been in 50% remission from schizophrenia

For around 10 years.

The Absurd Or

The Jungle Gives a Colder Stare

The core element of this story is

A cat and mouse tale.

Well, we all have our dark sides,

To say the least.

It is the nature of the beast.

The legend of the beast:

It is only too obvious that

No one wants to work.

And that is just the icing on the cake.

They have taken too much too far

Of the cart before the car.

And it is like the people say,

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

This condition is easy to diagnose,

But virtually impossible to treat.

There is only so much

God can do with us.

The enlightened understand

We are here to pay our dues

And to build a reward in Heaven.

The cat’s name is Fog Gears.

It survived the stark environment

Of a tenth floor, concrete honeycomb flat.

That’s no place for a cat

To be cooped up in.

It’s as foreign from its natural environment

As the Moon would be to us.

It used to throw up a lot.

Existence can be like

An endless, hopeless walk

Through a dense fog.

All you can see is

Within a radius of a few yards.

But every so often the fog clears

And you can see everything all around you.

And existence becomes satisfying if not a pleasure.

You deserve it.

What do pets make of

TV, toilets, cars, money, etc.?

I had a dream once

That I was an animal in the woods

Looking at all the traffic

Going by on the street

And at all the houses in the aria.

The animal I was

Wanted to get close to people

But didn’t have the slightest idea

Of what people were doing

Or how to get close to them.

It was profoundly sad because

It knew it couldn’t reach them

And that they would always be

And total mystery to it.

It is a pet’s plight

To pray like a leper

For food and water

From their owners,

Instead of a territory

Full of game, and

The terrain of the Earth.

They are treated like a guest 24/7,

Who is supposed to overextend his/herself

To total strangers

As a captive audience.

Pets are as anonymous as

A government statistic,

Down on the floor

And out of the way,

Painting themselves into a corner.

Fog Gears felt as if

He may as well have been

Sentenced to life in jail

With no possibility of parole.

Trapped. No exit.

His only release was to

Dream about escaping,

But all the time he knew

His escapes were a fantasy

And all in his mind

And doomed to come to nothing.

All he went through,

And still no one like him.

He wondered if he was invisible,

Or if this was all a nightmare

He would awake from,

And not a moment too soon.

His morale routinely hit

The all time low

Like playing lead role in a cage.

He believed the darkness

Of his doubts and fears

Were always on the brink

Of swallowing him up hole,

Like a water snake would a frog.

He was so afraid that he imagined

His fur jumping out of his skin.

But nonetheless he would prefer

Fear over death.

Was it just here today and gone tomorrow?

Was it all just going to come to nothing?

Is it that we have had our shot,

Like a Saturday afternoon

Clambake, beer keg party,

And now the feast is over

And all that’s left is shit.

All gone.

Nothing more can be done for you.

And don’t ask why,

Because knowing why makes it worse.

Is it that we are simply

Capriciously created and destroyed?

And you said it was all the same to you

And nothing mattered

World without end.

Then he’d laugh like a madman,

There is always laughter

Hidden under your breath,

And the dark shadow would vanish.

Fog Gears felt so twisted and unkind.

I got a bad deal, he’d tell himself,

"If I was a little bigger

I’d sure as hell show them who’s boss."

But he dreamed in vain.

Risking a confrontation

Was out of the question.

He was out numbered and out sized.

He just had to accept,

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Logically it made him so mad

He could barely talk.

So he stopped being logical

And set his sights

On being senseless and

In indulged in mental free association.

He interpreted everything

Any old way he wanted to.

The thrill of it was

No one could stop him.

But he found out that

Bad mental health isn’t the solution,

And that there was more bad news

Just outside his door.

It started with long losing streaks

Spent in the disturbing acknowledgment of

What he could never recall afterwards.

Or he’d be seized by an idea

Which seemed at the moment to mean everything,

And he’d stay up late into the night locked in its grip,

And then crash to the realization

The next morning,

Grimly smiling at himself,

Because obviously the idea

Didn’t matter to nothing.

A fabrication without substance.

As transitory as a patch of sunlight

On the lawn

Which will soon be gone.

Then he hit another all time low

He would get to know so well.

It was based on a recurrent guilt trip.

This guilt trip was remarkable

Considering the plausibility it had for Fog Gears,

And the way he simply couldn’t shake it,

Although there was

Absolutely no empirical data

To support it.

The trip was, he wondered if

In a previous incarnation

He was as big as all get out,

And this here and now

Was punishment

For keeping the population down

Around a water hole.

You could call the trip, Melancholy fever.

Such obscure ideation

Leaps from your imagination

If you are walking home alone

From the city streets of Babylon

To find yourself and God.

Fleeting images come and go

Without your control.

He wished his imagined past’s guilt fantasy was true,

Because if he had to pay for his sins,

He would. That much he could grasp.

Because that fate or prospect

Was vastly preferable over

The way it seemed to him now.

I.e. that he was in eternal hell

And his memories of youth,

And all other fun,

Was a delusion.

He grew out of that guilt trip

In a way that was remarkable to him,

Because the shit never hit the fan,

And he honestly expected it would.

But it was actually a case of

Being set up just to be shot down,

Because he became rampantly delusional.

He was out of the frying pan,

But into the fire.

He began to constantly imagine

Worse case scenarios than his own.

He would ramble on and on dejectedly

About what could or would have happened

Beyond the outskirts of infinity.

What if the dirt under the road

Felt all the heavy traffic

That ran over it 24/7?

What if someone was smothered by

Filling the eternal needs of infinity?

What if no news is good news?

What is a black hole star all about?

Is it worse to survive than to die?

What if nature is that evil wins?

Do we only learn the hard way?

It was like being stranded in crossfire,

Or alone where he didn’t belong.

He felt like a cat on a hot tin roof

Of like a dog shitting on ice.

But he snatched victory

From the jaws of defeat

When we was selected

By government personal

To take part in an experiment

To see if a housebroken and domesticated animal

Could regain his natural disposition